The Far Empty (26 page)

CHRIS

H
e was covered in blood.

They got up before dawn, not that Chris had slept much anyway, to the sounds of bugling and other animal noises, and made their way toward them. They broke cover at a wallow—cold water and colder mud spotted with hooved tracks the sheriff said were fresh—finally settling into a killing spot the sheriff favored.

The sheriff put him downwind with the cow call, told him to work the plastic horn. The sheriff set himself up high in a ridge of Hinckley oak. The elk, if there was one, would come direct to Chris’s calls, sounding him out of his hiding place, but it would be leery, looking hard. Elk were big, but not necessarily dumb. Even if it spied Chris, it might never see the real danger lurking a dozen yards away. He had a hard time focusing and fumbled with the cow call, but kept at it. An hour became two or more. He couldn’t see the sheriff, only wind moving pale branches and flakes in the air. The sky was the color of a bullet.

He couldn’t concentrate, not only because of what the sheriff had revealed about Anne the night before, but because of the call he’d made to Garrison before leaving Murfee. He had a day before they came to El Dorado and pushed the DEA agent on getting the full forensic report on the body from Indian Bluffs; told him it was important, to use whatever pull he had, if any. After that, Chris would meet with him and help him any way he could. Garrison had wanted to know what he was supposed to be looking for. Chris had said he’d know it when he found it.

Chris was finally about to give up on the horn, stand and stretch and tell the sheriff he needed a break, when he heard shuffling, breathing. The elk came into view. It was bigger than he thought possible, the musty stink of it carrying to him. It was losing summer weight but gaining a shaggy winter coat, its heavy antlers crooked, dipped low. It was a bull, the points of the rack wide and sharp like an iron crown; lord of a harem, and curious about that solitary cow that it thought was lost or injured, calling from the underbrush.

It came, slow, nose down and huge dark eyes up, scanning. It spotted Chris, saw right through him, and stopped.

Chris glimpsed the sheriff, picking him out of the undergrowth. His gun was up and aiming and Chris could see right down the barrel even though there was no sunlight to gleam off of it. It was as wide as a canyon, a void big enough to lose the sky in, darker even than the elk’s eye—the big animal a sudden blur and burst of motion at the sheriff’s presence. Kicking and turning and running. It looked back once, accusing, as if to let Chris know it was on to the trick all along. But the trick was on Chris. He knew where the gun was aimed, and he yelled when it went off, surprised it sounded so goddamn loud.

He was covered in blood.
The sheriff’s shot took the elk through the
rib cage, right in the lungs. The beast dropped in mid-leap, stumbling and pissing everywhere; went down headfirst, huge lungs filling with blood.

It never even made a sound.

The sheriff slid out of his hiding place, leaving leaves and dirt in his wake. Chris imagined the gun was so hot it glowed like a lit match.

“Damn, that’s a big one,” the sheriff called out, mostly to himself, approaching the creature carefully. Chris joined him, breathing twice as hard, as if he’d run a marathon. The sheriff, smiling, knew the answer even before he asked the question. “Damn, son, what was all that yelling about?” Then he poked at the elk’s open eye with the muzzle of the gun, to make sure it was dead.

•   •   •

He was covered in blood, the natural consequence of field-dressing the kill. The sheriff showed him how to cape and gut it, how to cut its head off. They removed the innards, split the brisket open, and pulled the windpipe free. They tied it up by its legs over the little stream and let the blood run out, which the sheriff facilitated by taking handfuls of muddy water and tossing it into the ruined body, watching it all drain out at their feet.

They did more cutting and quartering and the sheriff got out his collapsible dead sled so they could drag their kill back to the truck. It was going to be a long trip. Chris’s hands were red going to black. All that strange blood was trapped beneath his skin and he felt stained, marked, like he would never get it off of him.

The sheriff clapped him on the back, offered his canteen. “It’s a helluva feeling, isn’t it, Chris? A helluva feeling.”

Later they were crawling hand over fist through the undergrowth,
dragging that damn dead elk, when the sheriff finally asked him about the agents. They were just stopping for a break, the sled between them stinking of cold copper, pennies, when he brought it up.

“The feds are still poking around, asking questions. It’s a tragedy, a horrible tragedy. I never want to see any of our own hurt. If there’s one thing that keeps me awake, Chris, it’s that.” The sheriff squinted against a sun that wasn’t there. “A damn shame. That memorial was tough . . . emotional. And that young girl, all burned up, still hanging on like that? A lot more questions than answers.”

“A lot of bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time,” Chris said.

“Possibly.” The sheriff rubbed his jaw with a bloody glove. “Neither were born or raised in Texas, so they probably thought they were in the wrong place every goddamn day. This place isn’t for everyone.” He tried a smile. “And that’s what bothers me. What were they doing all the way out in Valentine? Working? Seems like we should have known about that . . . spotted them around. A big ole black Tahoe like that? You know, passing on the road, if nothing else.”

Passing on the road, if nothing else.
A cold knot turned in Chris’s stomach. Chris wasn’t sure how, exactly, but the sheriff knew about his stop on 67, maybe even the video.

Who do you trust, Deputy Cherry?

“Maybe we didn’t know because they didn’t want us to.” The sheriff eyed him. “Common courtesy says if you’re working in another man’s backyard, you tell him. Feds, locals, it makes no difference. Trust is necessary. It’s a courtesy that keeps blue-on-blue accidents from happening. Secrets only lead to trouble, Chris. Good people get hurt that way, happens all the time.”

The dead elk was still leaking blood all over the sled. The severed head stared back at Chris with glassy eyes. If he bent closer, he’d
almost see himself reflected there. “I don’t know. I really don’t.” But pushing a bit, “I wonder if it had anything to do with that dead Mexican I found at Indian Bluffs?”

The sheriff spit, wiped his mouth with that bloody glove again, and picked up the sled’s nylon rope. “Now why on earth would you think that?”

•   •   •

The full report was done, being signed off on. Garrison would have it officially in a few days, but he’d been better than his word and got what Chris had wanted—needed, anyway—just before he’d set out with the sheriff. He’d taken the call with the sheriff’s truck still idling in his driveway, Garrison reading fast in that brutal early-morning hour from all the pages that had been e-mailed to him the night before.

The ulna is one of the two bones of the forearm. The injury on the remains from Indian Bluffs was an ulnar shaft, or nightstick, fracture—so called because it’s the sort of break common when someone gets hit with a nightstick, raising an arm up to defend himself, although Chris guessed that wasn’t the case. When it’s bad enough, displaced, it’s repaired through open reduction and internal fixation, basically the insertion of a strong metal rod—plates and screws. That was something Chris
did
know about: when his knee shattered, the bone below it had cracked, too. He’d gone through the same procedure. After all, ulnar fractures are a pretty common injury for athletes, especially football and basketball players. Soccer players, too—if they’re struck by the ball in just a certain way, kicked in just the right place.

According to what Garrison had read to him over the phone, this particular fracture had happened when the deceased was young and
had been left to heal with only a cast. Not the best treatment, because the fracture was very serious, serious enough it was still evident in the adult bones—like a crack in a pane of glass—all these years later. Evident . . .
evidence
. Just the sort of thing that might identify the bones Chris had found at Indian Bluffs if you knew to look for it. And that treatment, shitty as it was, might have been all that someone without a lot of money or no medical insurance could ever get—someone who might have found it easier to cross the river to have it done in Mexico.

Someone like Rudy Reynosa.

•   •   •

They didn’t talk much more as they made their way back to the truck, getting there as night started to fall. Really, they didn’t talk at all. There was nothing more to say. They had a long drive back to Murfee in the dark, both of them covered in dried blood the whole way.

Who do you trust, Deputy Cherry? Can you trust everyone in your department? Can you trust anyone in Murfee at all?
Chris couldn’t shake the memory of the sheriff’s big Sauer 303 pointed at him. For just a heartbeat, it had been pointed at
him
, not at the elk.

Just a heartbeat, but long enough.

CALEB

W
hen I woke up, she was gone. I knew she would be. I rolled over, searching for the fading warmth of her body, the only thing to even hint she’d been with me at all.

Later I went into my father’s room and contemplated searching his dresser drawers, his nightstand, looking for clues. Secrets. But standing near his bed, I had images of traps, land mines: a feather or piece of fishing line falling to the floor; my breath hanging in the air, still visible, long after I’m gone—a thousand clues that might reveal my presence to him when he returned. It’s so goddamn funny that we both spend so much time hiding from each other, pretending.

Him, that he’s a loving father. Me, that I’m a loving son.

We’d traded numbers that night outside the school, so I texted Chris, asking him to tell me when they were on their way back. I had to check in and make sure he was okay. It was a risk, and I knew he wouldn’t even get it until they were well on the road from El Dorado.
There are no cell towers out there, and phone service is nonexistent. It’s like a piece of the world that’s fallen off, a jigsaw puzzle piece lost on the floor. I wasn’t even sure he would answer me. I just wanted to know . . . something. No matter what I’d said the night before, I was worried.

I was afraid of my father’s room, but not of the attic. That’s where he’d put my mom’s stuff, and with him gone and still hours from home, I pulled down the ladder and crawled up there to look through those things one last time. Mostly I just wanted pictures—to see us together again. I wanted to see her face one more time, afraid I might not be remembering it right. That her hair was brown and not blond; that I had been dreaming her eyes were green when they were really blue. All these things I thought I knew and remembered, that I’d had wrong all along. That she never existed, was nothing but a dream.

But the boxes were there under the roof just where my father had put them that day he slapped me on the back, leaving a dusty handprint. They were neatly stacked, along with other things from other wives. I sat for a long time in the still and gloom before I opened up the first and looked through it. It didn’t hold my mom’s clothes or her old Christmas decorations or even the photos I’d been looking for. It took me a few moments to even figure out what I was looking at.

Then I dumped the box all over the attic floor.

•   •   •

I heard from Chris a little while later, two texts, both simple and to the point.

A warning:
On our way.
And the second as good as a promise:
You were right.

MELISSA

S
he was outside smoking, listening to
Dark Stars
, when she realized Chris was home.

The shower was running hard.

She came in, still wrapped up in blankets, to find bloodstains on the edge of the sink, on the tub. Through the old shower-door glass, fogged and green and thick, all she could see was red. Her heart hurt and she pulled back the door fast to find him standing there, head down, water running over him, scrubbing at his bloody hands. She made a noise, half reached for him.

He told her: “It’s not mine, I’m okay.” They’d just shot an elk, a big one.

She asked if he’d done it, pulled the trigger himself, and he shook his head no. He was just the decoy, the dummy.

He turned away, leaned his head against the wall; held his huge bloody hands at his side. He said, “I think I’m in trouble, babe.” The
water was so hot Mel could feel it from where she was standing, like Chris was trying to set himself on fire. Trying to burn all the blood away.

She slipped out of her blanket, out of her clothes, and got in the shower with him. She gasped at the scalding water, but it hurt less than her heart. She filled up her hands with soap; put it in his hair, all over his chest. She held his hands in hers and scrubbed them with her own. She washed all of him until the blood was all gone.